In this Chemthink tutorial, you will explore the particulate nature of matter and complete a short quiz. Topics include:

Elements, compounds, and mixtures

Solids, liquids, and gases

Atoms and molecules

This new HTML5 version was built from the ground up to run on iPads, mobile phones, Chromebooks, and real computers in any HTML5-capable browser. Please let us know if you have any issues. Thank you so much to Mr. Charles Sprandal for creating the original version of this wonderful tutorial!

The following fill-in-the-blank notes were provided by Rebecca Carlock at Centennial High School.

(19) comments

I think the picture shows a glass of water with small atoms and molecules when zoomed in. The liquid shows how the molecules are moving faster and I predict it is a hot water because it have more energy.

Also we should notice that the small white and red ones in the water are molecules. They are not atoms but instead they are water molecules. If you look closer the red ones are oxygen and the two white ones are hydrogen which are written in H2o stands for water.

As a high school science teacher, I am extremly pleased that chemthink has come back and I’m also pleased that the HTML5 version doesn’t require Adobe Flash. It can now be used on the iPhone. There is still a problem however. Now that the pocket device has become the number one most accessible device in public schools and has already bypassed the larger screen devices, I’m hoping that the programmer can fix this program so that it can be zoomed in and out by pinching and spreading the fingers on the screen. If that deficiency could be fixed then chemthink would be far more accessible to all of my students and everyone else. Please try. Thanks.

Thanks for the comment and the feedback! Both the original Flash versions and the new HTML5 versions are designed for a 16×9 aspect ratio, the same aspect ratio used by most laptops and most mobile phones, including the iPhone, in landscape mode. I’ve been making sure that all fonts and buttons meet both Apple and Google’s Human Interface Guidelines for usability while in landscape mode. Unfortunately, the technology I’m using doesn’t allow for pinch to zoom, but simply by turning their devices sideways, most students should be able to use everything just fine. If you find something in particular that is driving you crazy, let me know and I will do my best to fix it.

PS – I gave some thought to a square layout, like the rest of the SimBucket simulations, but decided that it would take too much time to try to figure out how to fit every scene into the more restrictive format.

One more thing: Could the programer create chemthink question sets that could be imported into moodle 2.0 and higher including moodle 3.0. This is another application that’s sweeping academia because it makes grading see easy. I for one would be willing to purchase such chemthink question sets for my moodle courses.

I’ll need to think about this one a little. Right now the Chemthink question sets are designed to be richly interactive in ways that Moodle can’t (easily) accommodate. For example, some questions have oddly-shaped hit areas, complicated drag and drop logic, or dynamically generated animations, none of which play nicely with a cookie-cutter LMS quiz module. Your best bet might be to create a series of multiple choice questions that work in Moodle. If you are willing, I would be happy to host them here for other teachers to share.

I know that requiring students to remember a password for their LMS, and a password for Google, and a password for ChemThink, and a password for everything else they use is a big pain in the neck, but I don’t yet have a good way to solve the problem. I’ll keep it on the to-do list though. Once I get all of the tutorials working in HTML5, my next task will be to address student progress tracking.

Sounds good. You don’t have to worry too much about my concerns regarding the missing pinch/zoom option. I will certainly still have my students use Chemthink on their mobile devices and I will wholeheartedly promote Chemthink for you because it’s what we need and what the government and the textbook publishers have failed to provide. The two good things that you have done is that you have brought back Chemthink and you’ve started transferring the tutorials to html5. That’s certainly quite sufficient for now and you already have a good following. You just need to get them all back. Furthermore, you are right about Chemthink’s tutorials. Neither Moodle nor any of the other LMS’s is set up for that but it is set up for installing links to your chemthink website. Teachers can then take it from there. In return, I’ll share with you anything that I create that might go well with Chemthink.

I used the new and improved Chemthink today with my students. I love that it is back and I feel more user friendly. However, only a few of my students’ accounts showed that they had completed the tutorial and question set on my Student page. I know they went through the tutorial and question set. Did they miss a button to push? Now that I think about it, maybe they didn’t actually get 10 questions right and thought they were completed……any other ideas?

I love that students can not get to the question set until they complete the tutorial. Also, I like how all the backgrounds are the same green so it is easy to see who is not on the chemthink website with just a glance around the room.

Thanks for the comments, and you are correct! — the system doesn’t register tutorial completion unless a student sees the “You have finished this tutorial!” screen with “updated” written below. For a question set, the system doesn’t register completion unless a student sees the “You have finished this question set. Great job!” screen with “updated” written below.

I have had quite a bit of personal experience with students who didn’t realize that the screen that says “You have missed three questions. You may want to look at the tutorial for this unit before attempting the problems again.” means that they did not successfully complete the assignment.

Chris,
Thank you for your quick response. I didn’t give enough directions like I had done in the past about making sure the students knew that they had to complete 10 questions before they were “done”. Oh, can’t wait until tomorrow when I hear all the groans…..
Thank you again for getting Chemthink up and going again.

On the issue of passwords, I make all students use the password “chemistry” for chemthink and then there is no issue. We suspect that no one will break into their chemthink account and do the work for them.